This problem is ancient. It's basically the same problem as we had in the days of MS-DOS: the biggest threat vector was clueless users who insisted on installing the latest toy without doing any checking or research. Screen saver, background changer, media player, whatever was new they insisted on having. No matter how many times they got burned, they kept repeating the same mistake. Now we have developers downloading the latest fad package without doing any checking or research, just because it claims some highly-trending keywords or something. Feh.

Can we say "positive feedback loop"? The LLM's designed to produce responses likely to follow the prompt. Producing responses that agree with and support the user's thoughts (whether rational or delusional) tend to elicit more prompts, which makes that sort of response more likely to follow a prompt than one which disagrees with the user. The more the user sees affirmation of their thoughts and beliefs (whether rational or delusional), the more convinced they are that they're correct. Lather rinse repeat until they're thoroughly brainwashed by their own delusions.

This is why engineers apply negative feedback loops to systems to keep them from running out-of-control. LLMs aren't amenable to having such installed.

Not a chance of this happening, because the current state of AI doesn't have the concept of a popular, high-probability concept not being the correct next step just because it happens to also be false.

No, people didn't originally expect case insensitivity. That happened because technical "experts" assumed they did when mixed-case was added to character sets. Originally, filesystems were case-sensitive but the character sets didn't include lower-case characters so you literally couldn't create a filename with anything except upper-case letters. When lower-case was introduced (mostly with the adoption of ASCII) nobody had any special reason to prefer case-insensitive because the concept was brand new. We could've simply extended the existing practice of comparing directly by character code for filenames, resulting in everyone considering case-sensitive filenames the obvious choice (because it was what all the systems they worked with used) and case-insensitive the aberration.

I get the feeling this is driven by the Certificate Authority industry rather than any real need. Their biggest concerns are for compromises in the issuing process, where the wrong parties get issued a certificate they shouldn't have. There's a revocation protocol already defined, but the CAs would rather make certificates expire faster than support revocation lists. This incidentally makes them more money issuing new certificates. Maybe we should push for better support of OCSP so compromised certificates can be revoked quickly without impacting anything that wasn't compromised.

I can't see where it's theft, or even any sort of illegal or grey area. They paid for the tickets fair and square, by the lottery's own admission. There's no limit on the number of tickets one person can buy. One person buying $25.6 million worth of tickets or 25.6 million people buying a single $1 ticket, the outcome's the same. And the tactic is a well-known one for gamblers: bet when the payout exceeds the odds of winning. That's all this group did: see that the payout for winning would be greater than the cost of buying enough tickets to guarantee a win, so the bet would be profitable.

Why would you use a VPN app when Android and iOS both include support for VPNs without one? Using one just adds one more thing that can be compromised.

This'll be a three-ring circus with two clown cars. Start with every employee's cel phone, and any smart watch they may be wearing. Add in any tablets or tablet-like devices they may bring in (think the reMarkable). Then add in the havoc as they find every legitimate device on their network whose MAC address isn't known (like anything that uses MAC address privacy). After that, then they get to the fun of finding anything transmitting a radio signal in a building chock full of devices that use Wifi and Bluetooth.

Way back in the 70s in driver's-ed classes they taught us this: the best way to get where you're going quickly is to cooperate with other drivers, settle into the flow and leave room for traffic to merge in and generally don't disrupt the smooth flow of traffic even when that means driving slower than you might otherwise. They even demonstrated the differences for us. But people are greedy, and while they'll cheerfully take credit for gaining one spot by cutting in and out they'll equally cheerfully blame everyone else for the traffic jams that cutting in and out generate. Fortunately we can program self-driving cars to not be greedy. Humans are a bit harder to issue wetware updates for.

But seriously, if these researchers are just now realizing this then they need to go back to the traffic studies done in the 60s and 70s (and possibly earlier). All of it's applicable to self-driving cars.

For the same reason it bothers us? Because they won't like finding out that they could have made more money if their suppliers weren't engaging in surveillance pricing.

I'd phrase it another way to make it clearer to the business interests: "Imagine you run a grocery chain and you discover that your supplier is charging you a higher price than your competitors pay because he noticed your profits are higher and you can afford to pay more.".

"Real bank apps" do in fact have options to allow transfers, payments, etc. without additional authentication. They're there because, as bad an idea as they are, users have demanded ways to avoid having to enter credentials (even biometrics) every time they want to pay someone. Those of us who understand security have been saying over and over that this is a bad idea because if you can do something without needing to authenticate first then anyone who has your phone can do it too. And users still enable those options to disable the extra authentication checks in the name of convenience, all the way back to not requiring a PIN/password to unlock the phone (biometrics are no protection, the thief just has to apply a finger or scan the victim's face once and then make sure the phone doesn't lock itself before they can disable the biometrics or set a PIN/password they know).

Never use biometrics to unlock the phone, always require a PIN or password for that, and never turn on the options to bypass additional authentication when accessing an app.

It seems like a Russian ship is the most likely source of the damage, the only question is whether it was intentional or accidental. But does that really matter? Either way, the damage is identical. I'd quote a variation on Clarke's Law: "Any sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice."

I've seen a consistent position across employers that it's acceptable to tell a candidate when they show up on their first day to complete paperwork that the job offer has been revoked and they don't have a job waiting. The justification is that nothing is final until the paperwork is signed, and until it's final the employer is free to decide they don't want to fill that position.

As long as employers take that position, then employees have the same freedom to decide they don't want to accept the offer until the paperwork is signed and the deal is final.

It wasn't always this way. I was in San Diego during the firestorms of the early 00's, and there the fires tended to stop almost dead once they hit the developed areas. But the developments on the edges were typical suburban ones, houses spaced apart with grass lawns between them. That broke up the fuel supply enough that the firefighters could stop the spread from going past the outermost houses. The exceptions were neighborhoods like the Cottonwoods where HOA regulations forbade clear areas around houses, those neighborhoods burned to the ground.

Since then developers have gotten greedier, increasing the density of "suburban" developments until they're as dense as inner-city neighborhoods. Now wildfires hit those areas and turn into inner-city fires instead, spreading quickly between buildings.